Blog Post by Choices Teaching Fellow Deb Springhorn

For 30 years I have lamented the lack of time to teach the current global situation in the context of a world history course that is supposed to go from the prehistoric to the present in one year! Given the global paradigm shift after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid shift again after 9-11, it has become even more imperative to prepare students for global citizenship by developing their understanding of complex global issues and instilling the disposition to see others as they see themselves. Choices Curriculum units and Teaching with the News lessons do just this. The goal in developing the course, Global Issues Since the Fall of the Wall was to create an interdisciplinary, common core based course that would incorporate as many materials from the Choices Program as possible. Beyond the Choices materials, students will read articles from a wide variety of journals and literature of several genres. They will examine photographic images by James Nachtwey as a way of seeing themselves in such places Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

This year long course is divided into four units:

The New World [dis]Order of the 1990s: Nationalism, War, and Genocide

America After 9-11: The Single Story of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq

The Frustration and Hope of “The Arab Spring”

Globalization: Geopolitical, Environmental, and Economic Issues.

Each of the four units is organized around 21st Century Skills, reflecting the Common Core. Choices Curriculum units and Teaching with the News lessons combine with the philosophical, literary, and artistic elements to provide students with an in-depth awareness of the complexities of the current global situation.

The web site for the course has unit overviews, detailed day-by-day plans, resource links, and annotated bibliographies of all the sources used for each of the units. The attached document illustrates each of the four units with materials from the Choices Program already incorporated in the first version of the course as well as others that will be added as the course continues to evolve. The key literary works are listed as well to show the literary connections.